Breaking the Rules on Painting Upholstery Upcycled Couch

[Music] hi there welcome to the upcycled design lab my name is Cindy and I craft using recycled and repurposed materials if you're new here I hope you'll stick around and check out some of my other upcycling tutorials and if you like what you see you can check the subscribe button below any of my videos also if you'd like to be notified when I upload new videos be sure to check the Bell icon as well so if you've seen some of my recent videos you know I've been working on a lot of projects to make over my craft room and you can see one of them behind me right here that I just did in cardboard but for this video I'm taking a break from that and I'm actually starting a new series that I'm going to call can this be saved because I like a challenge and I'd like to save things that to most people would probably be unsalable so I have a couch that I'm going to be repairing and painting for this video and I'm afraid it might be a kind of lengthy video because I have a lot of details to share with you so I'll try to make it as brief as possible but I do want to impart as all the things that I've learned from this project I also have a couple of other projects that probably could have fallen under this category and I'll link to them in the comment section of this video but a few years ago I fixed a tabletop that was very scratched up from our dogs with some tin cans and I also repaired some chairs to be sort of a faux wicker finish that my cats had really clawed up so for this video like I said I'm going to be working on a couch and because I like a challenge I will be honest right up front and tell you that I have not painted a furniture and upholstery before so I rather than starting with a small project like most people would I just jumped right in and decided to try to repair our couch so like I said before I hope this video doesn't get too long but I do want to share with you all of the things that I kind of learned through this process and as my video title states I did break a lot of the traditional rules that I saw in other videos from other people that have painted upholstery furniture all right so like I said before I've never painted upholstery so I did some research and watched a lot of videos and without fail pretty much everybody recommends that you start with upholstery that's in good condition but with all the animals we have in our house they're pretty hard on the furniture so this is what my couch looked like when I started [Music] so the first thing I needed to do was to make some patches to cover the holes and I decided just to use some denim and circle shapes so I am tracing some circles here and the trick about circles is that you want to cut about a half inch outside of the line that you've drawn and then you can clip into that line and then you're just going to sew the tabs down which will give you a nice round circle so I'm using some contrasting thread here because I want to be able to see it to pull it out later and I'm just starting the thread with a couple of loose stitches and then I'm going to go and fold down each tab and just put one stitch in each tab starting at the bottom corner in a diagonal pattern up to the top corner until I make my way all the way around the circle [Music] so once you've made it all the way around with your stitches you should be left with a nice round circle and the next step was to prep the actual holes in the couch itself so I'm just using a curved upholstery needle to kind of stitch the edges loosely back together this next step isn't exactly a broken rule but I've never heard of anyone suggesting that you use Mod Podge on your couch however I've used it for fabric before and because my patches were so big I wanted to make sure that this they stayed kind of connected to the couch even though I'm going to stitch around the edges so I'm just putting a thin layer of Mod Podge on and then I'm applying it to the couch and here I have sort of a I'm doing I'm going around a corner so I have to fold up the patch to make it actually fit around the corner so I'm going to pin it in place and then I will use my M upholstery needle to stitch around the edges [Music] so to stitch around the edge you want to use small stitches as you would if you were mending anything and if you've never used an upholstery needle before it's very helpful when you're working on very thick pieces of material or fabric because the needle will sort of guide itself back up towards you whereas a straight needle is much harder to use on these thick surfaces once I finished stitching all the way around the edge and down the fold I'm going back and removing the basting stitches so they don't show [Music] [Music] so I just repeated this process for the other two holes that needed patching and then just to make the couch look a little more even I added some more decorative patches to the rest of the couch so I did try to follow this rule but as I said I have a lot of pet hair in my house so for the cushions I was able to move those down to my craft room and clean them the couch upstairs just required a lot of reclaiming but I did vacuum them off and I found that a micro claw microfiber cloth and some cleaning solution was the best way to pull a lot of the pet hair out of the cushions you can spray the cloth or the fabric itself I found that it worked a little bit better if I just sprayed the cloth and tried to pull the hairs out and to kind of get a lot of the dust out of the fabric just by using a the cloth dampened with the cleaner [Music] so this rule maybe where I went the farthest off the rails because if you've watched any other videos on painting upholstery people seem to rave about chalk paint but I had almost a gallon left over from another project of this interior/exterior high-gloss paint so I did run some tests with it and I even tried making my own chalk paint with it I've also heard that you can add fabric softener to the upholstery paint but in the end after all my testing I decided just to use the straight high gloss paint [Music] so I did follow this rule for my first coat of paint I used a spray bottle just to dampen the top of the fabric but not soaked the pad underneath and it does help to get a smoother coat of paint on for the first time around to be honest for my subsequent coats I just went ahead with the straight paint but I think it does help to get the paint sort of deep into the weave for this first coat so I'm just working in small sections here spraying a small section with water and then I'm smoothing it out with my hand and going over it with the paint and one thing I found after I sprayed the water and kind of smoothed it out with my hand I was able to pull out some of those last little pet hairs that I'd missed with the first cleaning [Music] so a lot of folks recommend using a lot of water because they are suggesting that you're dyeing the fabric rather than painting it and I have kind of a dissenting view about that because if you're working on a synthetic fibers you can't really get the color into the fibers themselves but what you are doing with this first coat is filling in the weave and you do want a nice thin thinner coat to achieve that [Music] [Music] so here's my cushion after the first coat has dried and the texture is pretty scratchy so you do want to sand between each of the coats of paint so here I'm just using a glove on one hand and then I'm just sanding a little bit and you can feel right away that the scratchiness is going away so you don't have to sand a lot but you do want to sand the entire surface before you put the second coat of paint on so as I mentioned before for the second coat and any following coats I am just using the straight paint and you want to be able to let have plenty of time to let each coat dry and I did sand between each of the coats and I did end up doing four coats in total [Music] here's the cushion after the second coat has dried which you can see that it's closer to the true color but it's still pretty uneven [Music] so here I'm adding the final coat of paint and even though the fabric is getting stiffer it does get smoother with every coat of paint that you apply so the finish ends up being more supple than you would imagine it to be [Music] so this rule is pretty much a general rule whenever you're painting anything but it was pretty easy for me just to wipe up a few of the drips off of my wooden floor so I didn't really worry about having a drop cloth [Music] so the short answer here of course is there is no such place in my house and you can see the dogs kind of making an appearance here as I'm painting the couch and I'm quite certain that there are a few pet hairs painted into the finish [Music] again this just seems like a common-sense rule but unfortunately most rules don't apply in our house [Music] so here's a quick shot of the couch I still need to finish the last cushion but you can see it has kind of a nice leather look to it there are a couple of problem spots right here you can see where I allowed the paint to drip a little bit and there were some spots that were really hard to get to to paint right here I was able to get a couple of coats of paint on but then you can see that it's kind of attached with the paint now but I think it's okay cuz it's not really gonna pull away when you sit on it and hopefully it will wear pretty well because one of the best things about it at least for me because I have a lot of pets is that the hair doesn't get woven into the fabric anymore because it's got more of a vinyl or leather look to it and the hair just kind of brushes off now instead of weaving in and sticking to the fabric so I think it's going to stay a lot cleaner and I think it looks all-in-all a whole lot better so I just need to finish that last cushion and give it one final sanding and then maybe a little bit of Wax [Music] so one of the things I learned when I was trying to learn a little bit more about painting upholstery is that you can add a finishing wax to make the finish a little bit softer but quite honestly by the time I got the fourth coat of paint on the couch it had a really kind of nice vinyl ii leather it's stiff but it's soft and smooth finished so i decided not to bother with the waxing plus i think you have to continue to wax it after the finish wears off i should mention that this did take a lot of paint like i said i had almost a gallon of paint when i started and i ended up having to buy two more gallons which has had some left over but i it took a little over two gallons of paint to cover this couch and the last note i wanted to mention is that some people have said that their chalk paint finished cracks and that's another reason for putting the wax on but this high gloss paint so far seems very flexible and sturdy so i don't think i'm gonna have any problems with the paint cracking so that's it for today's video thank you so much for watching please do give this video a thumbs up if you enjoyed it and if you have any questions feel free to ask me those in the comments below also please consider becoming a subscriber and i hope to see you soon [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Upcycle DesignLab

Views: 26,770

Keywords: How to paint upholstery, Hand painted couch, Upcycled Couch, How to repair an old couch, How to paint a couch, Can you use house paint on upholstery, Furniture facelift, Furniture repair, Couch Repair

Id: uFUexqBM1b4

Length: 16min 16sec (976 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 29 2020